Today is the last day of the Advent of Justin. This means that if you follow me on Twitter, today is one of the last days I will post yet another reply into my huge mega-thread of Advent of Justin tweets. It also means that I need to wrap up this series and try to do some reflection on what this series of posts has tried to do.
But there hasn't really been any kind of theme here to these posts. Yes, all of the posts have been related to PureScript and most of them have talked about something specific in and to the PureScript language, but there hasn't really been much of any kind of progression in these posts, as advanced posts would be posted right before more beginner-friendly posts, and none of the posts have really been geared towards beginners of the language but rather intermediate and advanced users, who simply need some reminders of what things look like and where they should go look for more information.
So instead, I'll talk about a more generic topic that hopefully encourages people, experienced and inexperienced alike.
PureScript is for Everyone
The only important thing for you to use PureScript is that you don't give up. That might seem obvious here, but it really isn't obvious in practice, where we find ourselves quitting various things that we think would be good or fun to do not because of a good reason, but because of our mentality.
If I can ask for one thing from everyone for the following year, it's for positive thinking. It doesn't have to be naive -- indeed, we might not have PureScript if everyone were naively positive about everything around us. But it should be overall positive and constructive in the public space. Rather than just complain about why something is, it would be more helpful to ask why, and to then use the additional information to further speculate on why something is.
There are a few personalities that may not work for PureScript though, but they are few and limited to only one thing: total negativity. If you can't accept that you should put some effort into both learning and communicating with others, then there might not be anything others can do for you to use PureScript, and indeed, you may quit very early without having done much. But even if you are some kind of totally negative person, maybe given some reflection and help from others, you too could become a force of good, not just in PureScript, but in other spaces as well.
So please, try looking around in the PureScript documentation: https://github.com/purescript/documentation
Thanks for reading the Advent of Justin 2018!